Packing Light for a Summer Holiday: The Essential List

However idyllic your summer holiday is, getting there and back can be stressful. Waiting hours in airport lounges or train stations for connections, sprinting to make a flight, and hauling bags with you across unfamiliar cities, ensuring you arrive stressed, sweaty and in need of…a holiday.

We can’t help you with a tricky flight transfer, but we can at least ensure you’re carrying the minimum weight with you on your trip with our guide to packing light for your summer holiday. This might simply help to lighten your load, or it could mean you’re able to save money by traveling with hand luggage only!

Getting Specific

Think about the specific trip you’re doing: how you long you’re going for, where you are going and what you’ll be doing there. Break down your trip day by day to work out what you’ll need – clothes for the beach (or for exploring a foreign city), and maybe a change for the evening if you’re going to be eating out in a formal restaurant or you expect the temperature to drop.

If you’re planning a beach based holiday, then shorts, t-shirts and maybe some men’s Sliders could be all you need, and if you realize this and only pack them, you can travel much lighter than someone who doesn’t plan in the same way, and has to pack clothes to cover every eventuality!

Essentials

Work out what your essentials are when packing: think about the things you’d really miss if your luggage went missing – essential clothes, medication, kit like cameras.

If you structure your packing around these essentials, then you can see what extra space you have to include more. If you pack haphazardly, you might find you’re trying to find space at the last minute for items you might not be able to do without.

Your essentials list might look like:

• Travel documents like passports and visas
• Medication (whether it’s something you take regularly for an ongoing condition or ‘in case of emergency’ items like antihistamines)
• Basic toiletries
• At least one change of clothes

With additions or subtractions depending on where you’re traveling to, and what you’ll be doing when you get there.

Paper or eBooks?

Deciding whether to bring a paper guidebook with you is a surprisingly tricky decision in an age when you can rely on a smartphone. Leaning on your phone to research places to visit and plan routes can save you money and time, and also stop you having to carry a heavy book in your luggage.

That said, guidebooks cannot run out of power, break when dropped or cost you in roaming charges: weigh up the practicalities: it may be that a physical good will be a good use of your carrying power and weight allowance on your trip.